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Can we really trust our emotions? The world seems full of people who end up tortured by their feelings. Can’t we just get rid of all that anger and sadness, all that guilt and envy, all that anxiety and delusional rage?

Many ancient philosophies and religions have been trying to achieve this very goal through systems of control and repression. But there are also very valid reasons for why we have the emotions we have, as the clinical psychiatrist Randolph M. Nesse points out in his book Good Reasons for Bad Feelings. There are several evolutionary dynamics that explain the emotional responses we have, and it’s worth thinking about their implications for our well-being.

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Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution has for a long time been the most widely accepted secular explanation for how living organisms change over time. In the social sciences, however, Darwinism spawned a mire of theories on the role that evolutionary mechanisms play in shaping human society.

More than anything, there is widespread belief that competition filters out the weak and promotes the “survival of fittest,” and that markets select a certain class of talented and deserving people. Reality is more complex than this: many obviously talented and deserving people are not particularly successful in their pursuits, while many people with no apparent talent sometimes reap incredible rewards.

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What does it mean, to be rational? This is the question that Hugo Mercier and Dan Sperber ask in their revolutionary book, The Enigma of Reason. This book was a complete revelation to me. It shattered some of my most deeply held beliefs about intelligence, and its implications for our understanding of human nature are profound. I here summarize some of its main ideas, weaving in some of my own thoughts along the way.

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It is fascinating to observe how people become obsessed with their reputation. This is especially true in the era of social media. I find this fascinating because I believe that reputation is something that is very hard to control: it takes time to build, but can easily crash. Moreover, I have always thought that people who are excessively concerned about their image easily become false and superficial; and that caring too much about reputation makes you a slave to the opinions of others.

So why is it that reputation is such an important concern in our societies? The Italian philosopher Gloria Origgi offers a fresh and extensive understanding of reputation as a psychological and social phenomenon in her book Reputation: What It Is and Why It Matters. I here summarize some of the main points made by the author.

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